Erratic, eccentric, unpredictable: that was The Sun's Don Cromie

It was a time when the Province was sober and gray and The Vancouver Sun was the paper with the scandals, the splashy crime stories and the wildly outspoken columnists.

When The Sun's newsroom in the old Sun Tower sported the sign "There will be no drinking on the premises during working hours," and the bottles clinked when you pulled out the file drawers.

When Don Cromie was the wealthy, generous, vindictive, creative, eclectic publisher of the paper and you never knew what might happen next.

It could be a photographer sent up in a plane to take pictures of Sputnik. Ten reporters sent off with $50 apiece to check out the city's sex-for-dollars exchange, with only one casualty, one guy who didn't come back for three days. Consumer columnist Penny Wise sent to interview Elvis or to spend a few weeks with the Communists and see how they live. A Cadillac for the managing editor or the head of circulation in a good year.

Don Cromie, the symbol for many of a golden era of newspapering, died Wednesday at the age of 77.

Cromie rode the rails for a year in his early 20s at the advice of his father, who bought the Sun in 1917 and took it from bankruptcy to financial health. He ran magazines in Toronto and Palm Springs and Vancouver in the '60s. He developed real estate in the '70s and '80s. He threw exuberant parties his whole life, including one with Rudolf Nureyev and 200 ballet fans that had to be broken up by police because of the noise.

But he was remembered best for his 22 years as publisher of The Vancouver Sun. He was the last owner of an independent Sun. When he sold it in 1964, the Montreal Star mourned the loss of an extraordinary publisher who had created a paper with a "flavor and a quality unique in Canada."

He became general manager of The Sun at the age of 26, the same day in July 1942 that the paper's headlines blared: Million Huns Launch Drive for Caucases and U.S. Subs Sink 3 Jap Warships in Aleutians.

Ask anyone what he was like as a publisher and people start shaking their heads, some laughing and some shuddering at the memory of the chaos.

He was erratic, eccentric, brilliant, imaginative, interested in everything, aloof, warm, blessed with plenty of energy and a short attention span, a flashy dresser, never very financially successful, and completely unpredictable.

"It was very hard dealing with him - you never really knew what he'd do next. He would have made a beautiful king," says Alex MacGillivray, The Sun's current editorial-pages editor, who has hideous memories of a project he did under Cromie in the '40s.

"But if he was on to something, there was an excitement that flowed through the place."

"Fifty per cent octane, 50 per cent whim," is how Barry Broadfoot remembers him. "He let newspapermen run the newspaper. You got up in the morning with a sense of eagerness."

He was fascinated with toys and science, especially when they were combined. The stories are legendary about how far this took him. One reporter had to phone NASA to find out if rockets could be launched into space by spinning them like a yo-yo and cutting the string. Another had to check whether the Russians could build platforms in space to launch nuclear bombs from. Many did an endless string of stories on perpetual-motion machines.

And he was ready to give space to any new idea.

"His columnists rode off violently in all directions, brandishing their tiny lances," columnist Jack Scott wrote when Cromie left the paper. "And when that didn't seem enough, he instituted our Page Five so that the opinions of heretics, dissidents, scholars, propagandists and controversialists might challenge the reader to reach his own conclusions."

They sent the fashion editor, Marie Moreau, to Cuba, where she camped out until she got the first-ever interview with Fidel Castro.

They sent football columnist Annis Stukus to Formosa to interview Chiang Kai-shek.

That four-month reign, legendary even amid an epoch of creative anarchy, ended when Cromie packed Scott off to London as the correspondent.

Through it all, Cromie embodied a patrician-with-the-common-touch approach that would likely land him in front of a labor-relations board today. He'd bring in clams and oysters and bottles of liquor to the newsroom for an impromptu Friday night party. Or demand that photographer Ralph Bower chauffeur him down to where his yacht was being built, jumping into the back seat of the Thunderbird with a "Pardon me, old man."

He'd come to the newsroom to be with the guys when a big news story was breaking. He'd also threaten to fire someone who annoyed him.

Jennifer Larsen, who got a job at the paper on the basis of no newspaper experience at all after she met him at a party, laughs when she remembers him:

"It was such a wild, crazy time, a marvellous place to be. There was never a boring moment."

Cromie is survived by his wife, Geraldine; brother Peter; three children, Susan, Larry and Donald, and two grandchildren. The date of the memorial service has not been set yet.

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Erratic, eccentric, unpredictable: that was The Sun's Don Cromie

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